Harshini arrived, her plait loosening dangerously, full of a friend’s concern and news of Mr Mendes. They talked but argued, and Harshini stormed off.
Anupama sank down by the water and looked up. ‘So there will be no bargain with you, Moon. Which is just as well. Because I do not wish to dwell on what Harshini told me. That Mr Mendes sauntered up to amma and pretended to flirt with her, as he normally does. That he presented her with the next envelope from England. Or that of course she muttered back nonsense. I do not want to tell you that he looked uncomfortable and went with the letter to tatta, with Mohan tagging along beneath him, craning up most avidly. I want to forget tatta speaking to him and Mr Mendes swivelling his head around – Harshini said, as if searching for me. Of tatta frowning, and Mohan tugging Mr Mendes’ shirt to get his attention, and Mr Mendes starting, as if he had suddenly understood, and…’
A fish jumped with a plop.
Anupama spoke with a clenched jaw. ‘Mr Mendes bowed a foolish bow, I hear. And Mohan bowed a foolish bow also and snatched the letter from him and teetered off on tiptoe so that everyone would notice, with the letter balanced childishly on his head.’ She added, ‘You must know that Jayamal teased Harshini with, “Now Mohan can be free at last.”
‘And that when she repeated this, I said to her, “Well, that is nonsense. I do not know what he meant.”
‘Or that she said in a quiet voice, “Oh, Anupama.”
‘Or that I said rather formally, “Please explain.”
‘Or that she replied to me most sadly, “Are you sure that you liked talking to Miss Martine merely? Is it possible that in writing those letters you liked to hold Mohan under your thumb?”
‘Auntie-Uncle,’ said Anupama, ‘we quarrelled then. You saw us. It is true that I shall miss Mohan if we cannot meet over the letters, but that is because I am his sister. However, need that prove Harshini right?’ She eyed the current dully. ‘Very well. Just as these waters carry sediment and plant matter and detergent, I am not pure; nothing is pure. That young man may be right. I enjoyed my power over Mohan.’ She turned from the stream. ‘I do not need to ask you whether I shall see any more of those letters or write to Miss Martine ever again.’
Anupama never re-met the young man, but she found someone quite like him: philosophical but more practical, a little less cumbersome-looking. His name was Asiri. They met at another wedding, seven years thence.
12 Martine
Friday 8 February 2013
His name is Matt, and he’s here to paint the guest room. Martine thinks, somehow taken off guard, A boy, not a man. Milky jowls that don’t seem shaven, shrinking eyes. Nearly twenty, apparently.
She rushes, ‘I won’t say matt not gloss,’ and winces.
He’s unamused. He picks up the roaring crowd behind her, chucking his head.
She grins, ‘The cricket.’
It’s the last One Day International between Australia and the West Indies, and Sky Sports has been on since early. She’s still not sure she’s doing the right thing, taking the foreign visitor; and she’s anxious to get the spare room as it should be, so the jokes clunk in in force. The room was so small, when he put the key in the lock he broke the window. Hospitality: making your guest feel at home even if you wish he was. Eat everything up: visitors are coming.
Her mother’s stuff now crowds her own bedroom: golf clubs, suitcases, dog bed and the woman’s secret trophies, wrapped up in their box. In a separate bag lies the scrumpled Amelia Earhart scarf, which Martine was going to get framed. It’s quite hard to reach her IKEA four-poster.
The boy’s all right with the pocket size of the task. He fumbles with the steaming mug and homemade biscuits and wodge of lemon cake but gracefully spreads out dustsheets, sets down paintpots, tray and brushes. He barely looks at her. It’s a habit of the young that, as she gets older, she’s still never forearmed for.
She also gets easily hurt by the young’s absence: in the end, Jonas came alone the other night.
He’d said, making no bones, ‘I guess the girls have something better lined up.’
To congratulate her on her Jocelyn Teague decision, he’d brought a bunch of narcissi – and a jar of Marmite, bizarrely. She’d made too many plum tartlets. Those tartlets, if not eaten, soon go stale.
She goes back to the TV. The West Indies’ Tino Best bowls full to Finch, and it hits Finch on the pads and rolls away to the fine-leg boundary. Tino appeals for leg before, but it’s not upheld. Martine mutters agreement. Suddenly she senses Matt beyond the threshold, trying not to be seen.
She turns in her chair. ‘Interested?’
He chucks his head as if winking, so she beams back, then realises that it’s a tic that he can’t help. But he doesn’t move away.
‘It’s a kind of battle. Each over is a tactic, a separate skirmish. But you probably know that.’
He stays at the door.
‘Over?’ he frowns.
She smiles, still feeling he’s someone younger, imagining grubby knees beneath the paint-splashed jeans, a liking for conkers.
Tino bowls like lightning, and Finch tries to whip it to the leg side, but it comes at him too fast, hitting him on the thigh pad.
‘150 kph,’ the commentator says admiringly.
There’s a hollow clanking through the heating pipes.
‘Yeah, yeah, Mr Olfonse,’ Martine smiles.
The Jamaican patriot upstairs likes to make sure that she can hear him during a match.
At the corner of her eye she studies Matt. He catches her at it, chucks his head again. They grin. The next ball is quick, too, while the next hits Finch’s pads, and Tino appeals, and Martine sucks her teeth, but the ball was going down the leg side, so Tino doesn’t win. Matt folds his arms and leans against the doorframe. Best to Finch, another back-of-length delivery, and Finch is struggling, the ball again skimming the inside edge of his pads.
‘152 kph!’ the commentator whistles.
Mr Olfonse’s heating pipes are tolling in ecstasy.
The next ball is slower, and Finch drives it hard away, towards Tino, hitting him in the chest. Tino, startled, fumbles it and drops it. The Sydney crowd jeers, and Mr O’s heating pipes fall silent.
‘Leg side?’ Matt surprises her. ‘Back of length?’
‘Sounds like gibberish, doesn’t it.’
Now Matt has crossed his legs, and Martine and he grin, and as Johnson bowls to D.M. Bravo, and Darren hops and jumps, Martine finds herself sharing cricket speak.
As she translates and explains, three letter bundles, as if no longer in the wardrobe, appear behind her eyes. The jargon becomes their wavelength, hers and Matt’s. It begins to matter. But so, she owns with a qualm, does the fact that he’s a boy. Then she relaxes, for the first time in a long while.
* * *
No balls
(No ball: A failure to bowl within the rules of cricket)
1985–1986
It had all changed for Martine after her mother’s birthday, then the night at the swimming pool.
‘What I like most is writing to you…I have things still to say to you…I ardently wish you were here.’
The words of that letter had hit some soft spot. They brought back to her moments, important moments, when she’d felt needed, with someone begging for help.
‘Would you comfort me if I seemed in distress? …When I was in the north last week, I cried.’ That night with Gerry Taylor, for instance.
It was as if she’d been jetting along buffered by cloud when all at once, thanks to Astrid and a blood drop, white wisps had drifted aside to reveal dark, solid parts of Mohan far beneath. His veins were Sri Lankan mountain streams, or tendrils of some island creeper. She was seduced by a need she thought he had for her help – actually, by her desire for his dependency. Like his landscape, it began to grow inside her.
With so much riding on it, Martine’s next letter wouldn’t come. ‘Mohan. Dear Mohan. Dearest Mohan. Hello, young boy.’ In the end, with a ‘Sod it
,’ it was time to go to work.
On the journey she decided she might write better with less: a pen, not the computer. The tube carriage had an Audi ad, Vorsprung durch Technik. A woman and a schoolboy vibrated slightly beneath it. She didn’t speak German, but she looked knowing, pretended she knew what it meant. She thought, We’re surrounded by artefacts and artifice; civilisation makes so many artefacts, no wonder we pretend and make things up.
There was another overhead graphic, crayon-like, of a man and a woman on separate, parallel escalators, a heart above their heads. ‘Dateline: Don’t let love pass you by.’ But if we just correspond in letters, she objected silently, we so easily might.
The biro jogged in her hand. ‘Dear Mohan. I’m paying attention now.’
At work Charles Colgan, Lecturer in English Education, finished their discussion in his reasoning Irish brogue. ‘Sure and it’s a shame we’re not involved is all I’m saying.’
He turned on his heel and closed their conversation and the door of her office with deliberate neutrality. He’d just complained that without his knowing, she’d pressed the button on LIPSS, the Language In Primary and Secondary Schools project. (He’d re-sequenced this to ‘LISSP’, surely on purpose.) Martine’s team should have involved him.
‘A shame we’re not involved’: the phrase with its double meaning stayed with her when he’d gone.
She tore up the latest try-out letter for Mohan on her desk. She’d been finding Charles difficult –‘Charlie’ in her head only – not because he kept complaining to her and about her, or because they differed about multi-cultural education or the methodology for longitudinal studies. He was her junior in age and status, so that shouldn’t matter. But there was something about him that was undermining her warmth with all her other colleagues, too. A friction. It was obsessing her. Along with the wave in his hair.
When she’d activated LIPSS without telling the English lecturers, it wasn’t to nark him specifically: she’d simply hoped to avoid him. Hadn’t she?
That day she tried to forget him. She moved from their stiff discussion to advising Joanna Bacchus on revising her research proposal, then collected the overhead transparencies and handouts for her next workshop. In the staff lounge, wielding an egg and bacon sandwich, she claimed a seat beside Claire.
Claire announced, beaming, ‘I’m moving into a house. And Rollo’s moving in with me.’
‘That’s wonderful!’ Martine said, but the news felt like another gear change in her life.
Everyone’s moving, she supposed, just not in the same direction. She was moving, though not necessarily forward. She was blind dating, still, and throwing herself into work as ever. She’d begun a research paper on market forces in education, a college lecturer’s oblique act of defiance, and a book compilation of games for the classroom, her retort to the coagulating seriousness of many people round her. She was adjusting in her small if growing family; refreshing her friendships; provoking Charlie unthinkingly; avoiding Charlie thinkingly; trying to link to her far-away boy.
It was as if she was on the diagonal of an escalator, and vertical in a lift, and sliding along a belt on the horizontal, and spiralling round a staircase, and shifting in other planes too, on her own private Underground, all at once. Mohan’s life must be as complex. She thought, What chance then that my letters can ever land in his footfall – I mean, really reach him? It’s a miracle that his have ever touched me.
She confided to Claire, ‘Charles Colgan’s just had a go at me about my communication skills.’
She knew they needed work; surely everyone’s needed work. Yet she’d tried and tried with this new era of writing to Mohan with real intention, drafting and re-drafting.
In the end she wrote, ‘You say you’re annoyed. I don’t know how to make you feel better. Anupama sounds unhappy too….
‘You ask whether your hidden thoughts are real. They are. Consciousness is part of reality. Your consciousness is part of reality. I know it’s a very grown-up idea.’
He replied; but now, inexplicably, all his intriguing voices vanished. He sounded peevish, starkly different.
‘Now I am writing the letters by myself. I can read and write fairly. Soon I will be better than Anupama.
‘I am not annoyed. Now I sleep in the boys’ room with Jayamal.
‘My question is why are you writing with a pen not the Amstrad PCW 8512.
‘My shrew is dead. I still have a cough.
‘Your letter is not interesting. I do not understand consciousness and reality. Jayamal read me the words. I do not know about special ink either. Do you have a husband yet.
‘I do not understand the stamp. The man with a shield is on a horse. The lady is behind his back. She will make the horse tired. Is he brave.
‘Tomorrow I will make a shield.
‘I am going to play with Nalin.
Mohan
Letter written unaided’
‘I do not understand’?, she queried to herself. She didn’t understand, either. Mohan seemed to be rebuffing her just when she was interested. She thought, He’s writing now without his sister’s help: maybe that has somehow changed things.
Charlie sent her a memo, typed.
‘Presumably you’re familiar with R.Y. Hirokawa: “Discussion procedures and decision-making performance”. His finding that more effective group decisions are made when all views are fully aired beforehand? Can lend you his paper if you like…’
Barbed and nasty, she thought it. Of Mohan and of Charlie she found she wanted the same thing: that they’d stop it and be nice.
In the staffroom she passed Charlie marking student assignments. His green pen chased through the pages with underlinings, exclamations and vehement, dark scribbles. She’d expected his critical style to be deliberately light.
Writing she judged was fickle; with Mohan, it had uncontrollable effects. She asked him about growing up: ‘growing big’, as he seemed to call it. Perhaps her visuals, her special stamps, would encourage him to open up.
He didn’t, much.
‘My question is what shield. No I did not make one.
‘My question is why is writing better than a computer. I used to use a pencil now a pen. A computer is best.
‘About the stamp. Why did Lancelot take Guinevere. Rama rescued Sita. They were Hindu. I could not rescue Anupama. My question is was Lancelot brave.
‘I know you like writing to me.
‘Your brother is grown-up. How can he grow up more.
‘I will tell you about growing up. The story of the ten giant warriors. Their enemies tried to kill the king with arrows in the mouth. So they fought with arrows and swords. I am big for my cart. A grown-up king. I do not want an enemy to kill me in the mouth. These nights I hear the rain. I think it is arrows.’
His rudeness was rather wearing.
‘You sound a bit cross,’ Martine wrote. She tried to reassure him, to help him. ‘Whatever happened to Anupama, I expect you wanted to rescue her. If you failed, well, sometimes, you know, you have to count the thought, not the deed.’
But how could she really help him with whatever he needed help with, if he was going to be like that?
Jonas and Astrid paid her a visit.
‘Now we will have a child.’ Astrid’s Nordic inflexion sounded uncertain where there was no doubt, and Jonas looked transformed.
The pair had first got together like clockwork; as if she’d helped or planned it, Martine had been content.
She was going to say, ‘That’s wonderful!’ but recently, with so much news about, she’d been saying it so often that she was worried it wouldn’t sound true.
She started with ‘That’s won…’ and ended with ‘one down, just two to go.’
Astrid looked startled, revealing that she didn’t know Jonas’s three-point plan for children. Martine hurried in with an awful, crude plumbing quip about smooth junctures of male and female terminals.
Astrid’s pregnancy felt like a landmark. Martine
deliberately took a while to find fizzy drinks for them to celebrate. She told herself, I’ll be an aunt soon, so all must be right and good. But somehow she felt dented. First Phil and Matthias getting sensible, then Claire moving in with Rollo; and now this. How many knocks could her lifestyle withstand before it seemed defunct? But then she thought, I don’t want to trade it in.
1986, the start of the spring term. Cool sun on Hampstead Heath, and Martine was walking with a date, a talkative man with earlobes like fruit called Justin. They found an artist working on a tree. Andy Goldsworthy, famous now. He was lining the channels in the trunk: with hogweed stalks, he told them. Silver-green infills, they seemed to spread their own light, to ripple in the bifurcating grooves. Justin philosophised about what was true and what was false. Also, what was natural: always the opposite of false? The tree was natural and unnatural at once. Martine thought of the wave in Charlie’s hair. Its effect on her was powerful but wrong.
Mohan’s next letter came.
‘My birthday. I got a man in army clothes. Marvan’s brother had it before. Jayamal said great present soldiers are killing machines. I wanted a model jet kit. Also Upeksha’s eggplant curry and bitter gourd curry and milk rice. But Anupama cooked. I said the pol sambol has a strong taste of coconut. I did not mean the white part.
‘I am not cross. I am 8. Soon I will learn English.
‘The thought not the deed. I do not understand.
‘Upeksha has gone. I said to tatta is she in nirvana. He said in her opinion. She is working in Kandy. The mothers and tatta are cross.’
Late April came, and in Professional Education, Leanne was ill again; so was Pippa, assistant to the team. The LIPSS project was overloading them. Management proposed seconding Charlie in from Teacher Training.
‘Surely a coffee and a chat about it can’t hurt, now,’ he said outside her office. ‘You know you’re safe with me.’
He grinned, his broad fist twisting towards her in a dummy punch. It was another kind of visual: a gold band on one finger, flashed in her direction like a talisman. She didn’t flinch; her mind was racing, all the same.
On the Far Side, There's a Boy Page 11